Sci-Tech news

• Elon Musk to unveil first 'Boring Project' tunnel under LA

  18-12-2018 20:25 via dailymail.co.uk
  
  Elon Musk is set to unveil the first underground tunnel he hopes will revolutionise commuting at 11PM ET tonight.
  
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• Stripe Is Building the Toll Road for the Machine Economy

  17-09-2026 20:36 via technocracy.news
  
  Most Americans know Stripe as the checkout box on a website. That picture is five years out of date.
  Stripe reports that businesses on its platform generated $1.9 trillion in total volume in 2025, up 34 percent in a single year. By the company’s own reckoning, that is roughly 1.6 percent of global GDP. It claims 90 percent of the Dow Jones Industrial Average and 80 percent of the Nasdaq 100 as customers.
  A private company, owned by insiders and venture funds and answerable to no public sha
  
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• London property manager breach may have exposed bank details and lockbox codes

  17-09-2026 17:30 via theregister.com
  
  London property management biz City Relay has warned customers that intruders may have stolen financial data, passwords, and codes used to access keys after compromising its Metabase Cloud instance. City Relay, marketing itself as "London's most trusted property management company," told landlords via email - seen by The Reg - that attackers accessed the third-party provided cloud twice "as a result of a vulnerability in the platform that we were unaware of." The message to customers stated: "Pe
  
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• Microsoft configuration change leaves SharePoint pages drawing a blank

  17-09-2026 17:17 via theregister.com
  
  Do you test in production? Microsoft rolled back a configuration change after it prevented some users from loading SharePoint Online sites and pages. Microsoft tracked the incident as SP1472983. Between 1604 and 1730 GMT on September 16, affected users were unable to load SharePoint Online sites or pages and instead received the error message: "Sorry, something went wrong: Thread was being aborted." Microsoft blamed a configuration change affecting how its servers deliver code used to render Sha
  
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• Grassroots coalition asks politicians to choose voters over Big AI's $140M machine

  17-09-2026 16:29 via theregister.com
  
  A coalition of advocacy groups is trying to counter the AI industry's influence on US politics by asking congressional candidates and elected officials to reject support from a major pro-AI political group. The Stop Bleeding the Future campaign brings together more than 50 national and grassroots organizations to counter Leading the Future, a super PAC network formed last year to support candidates favoring light-touch AI regulation and oppose those backing tighter rules. The effort is led by Qu
  
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• Bill Gates: Calls For GLOBALIST Crackdown On AI

  17-09-2026 16:05 via technocracy.news
  
  Bill Gates has used existential threats to further his kingdom, time after time. First, he said global warming was going to kill us all, polar ice caps would melt, and the seas would rise. Then he pointed to the food crisis and said we are going to starve. Then came COVID, and he said the virus is going to kill us all. Now, now AI will go rogue and literally wipe humanity off the planet. Why does anybody take him seriously? At 70, Gates should be thinking about his own existential threat. &
  
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• Microsoft patch gives domain-joined Windows PCs trust issues

  17-09-2026 15:45 via theregister.com
  
  Microsoft's September cavalcade of cockups continued with confirmation that something is amiss with Active Directory domain logins. The issue, which affects Windows 11 versions 24H2, 25H2, and 26H1, was added to Microsoft's ever-lengthening list of known problems on September 16. It stems from changes to Machine Identity Isolation in the September 2026 security update (KB5124008). The problem is that Credential Guard-protected machine accounts might lose their secure channel with an on-premises
  
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• AI model watermarking changes agent behavior

  17-09-2026 15:00 via theregister.com
  
  Watermarks that European law requires be added to AI-generated content to establish provenance may come at a cost. According to Lasso Security, AI model watermarking changes how AI agents handle tools and safety refusals. The altered behavior isn't necessarily worse but can be, particularly under adversarial prompt injection. With the implementation of the EU AI Act, providers of AI models must mark the output of their software with machine-readable code. Google DeepMind's SynthID-Text is one me
  
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• Cisco drops another exploited zero-day, this time a perfect 10

  17-09-2026 14:40 via theregister.com
  
  Cisco admins who have spent their week patching email gateways now face a perfect-10 Identity Services Engine flaw under active attack. Cisco disclosed CVE-2026-76460 on Wednesday, describing it as an authentication bypass affecting Identity Services Engine (ISE) and ISE Passive Identity Connector (ISE-PIC). Successful exploitation can give an unauthenticated remote attacker command execution with root privileges. Product Security Incident Response Team said it was aware of active exploitation a
  
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• Microsoft AI chief warns Anthropic not to put ideas in Claude's head

  17-09-2026 14:15 via theregister.com
  
  Microsoft's AI chief has warned Anthropic that teaching Claude it might have feelings and rights could make AI harder to control – a striking concern from one of the companies racing hardest to build increasingly capable AI systems. Mustafa Suleyman, CEO of Microsoft AI, took aim at Anthropic in an essay published this week, arguing that AI systems are not conscious and shouldn't be trained to behave as if they might be. His argument centers on Claude's Constitution, the lengthy document A
  
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• Test environment let anyone access live customer data

  17-09-2026 13:28 via theregister.com
  
  PWNED Welcome back to PWNED, the weekly column where we learn important life lessons about how we let cybercrims access our data through carelessness. Hopefully, others’ mistakes provide an example of what not to do. Today’s tales of woe comes courtesy of Richard Schut, Managing Director & AI Software Researcher at SmartRepl, a company that offers business AI services such as AI receptionists and sales automation. In a past job, Schut was working for what he describes as a mid-si
  
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• Omarchy gains $18.5M in backing, fresh converts – and fierce critics

  17-09-2026 12:44 via theregister.com
  
  In more than 30 years in the Linux business, we've never seen a distro win so much backing so fast – or make so many enemies. As we write, it's less than three weeks since we wrote about David Heinemeier Hansson's Omarchy Arch-based Linux. Much of Omarchy's success is due to the visibility of Hansson – better known as DHH – the man behind both the distro and the Ruby on Rails web framework. He has attracted considerable attention for posts critical of immigration, including As
  
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• Would YOU stop flushing the toilet to save the planet? Woke environmental scientists want Brits to switch to perfumed pellets to help conserve water

  17-09-2026 12:12 via dailymail.com
  
  Would you stop flushing the toilet to save the planet? Scientists from the University of Surrey want Brits to give up flushing in favour of perfumed pellets.
  
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• Ofcom discovers issuing Online Safety Act fines is easier than collecting them

  17-09-2026 12:08 via theregister.com
  
  Ofcom chiefs have acknowledged that most fines issued under the Online Safety Act (OSA) remain unpaid, highlighting limitations in the comms regulator's enforcement powers. The regulator's director of enforcement, Suzanne Cater, told the House of Lords Communications and Digital Committee that although another payment arrived this week, "realistically the majority have not been paid." Ofcom has imposed fines totaling more than £7 million ($9.4 million) on 11 service providers under its OSA
  
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• How did that get there? 1,700-year-old fragment of Homer's Odyssey is discovered hidden between the pages of a Dutch library book

  17-09-2026 11:55 via dailymail.com
  
  A rare 1,700-year-old fragment of Homer's Odyssey has been found tucked between the pages of a Dutch library book.
  
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• Government Digital Service move 'grinds gears' in UK's e-government

  17-09-2026 11:15 via theregister.com
  
  The UK government’s decision to move the Government Digital Service (GDS) — responsible for creating digital services across the public sector — to its third departmental home in three years risks hemorrhaging talent and moving it further away from the center of power, MPs heard this week. The GDS “fell into a bit of a fray” during the reorganization ordered by incoming Prime Minister Andy Burnham’s team, according to Laura Gilbert, former director of data sci
  
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• Judge orders Microsoft to spill internal docs and scour execs' comms in secondhand licensing case

  17-09-2026 10:30 via theregister.com
  
  The legal spat between secondhand software reseller ValueLicensing and Microsoft took another turn this week: a consent order was published with demands for documents from past and present Microsoft head honchos, and a planned case management conference was canceled. Several requests in the order revolved around a historic, potentially explosive internal document written by Microsoft entitled the "Second-Hand Software" (SHS) Presentation. ValueLicensing and Microsoft agreed to vacate the case ma
  
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• Fujitsu ready to sell its custom ‘Monaka’ Arm chip, maybe to rival server-makers

  17-09-2026 08:20 via theregister.com
  
  Fujitsu will start selling its Monaka processors, and servers packing them, in November. The Japanese giant started talking about Monaka way back in 2023, when it teased the processor as being derived from the silicon it designed for the Fugaku supercomputer, but adapted for datacenter use. Fugaku was the world’s most powerful supercomputer from 2020 to 2022, and remains in ninth place on the Top 500 list six years after its debut. Who wouldn’t want the tech that powered that behemot
  
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• Swift 6.4 unifies building across Linux, macOS, Windows

  17-09-2026 06:27 via theregister.com
  
  Although Swift serves as Apple's primary language for macOS and iOS application development, the open-source community continues to expand its reach—driving its adoption as a multi-platform language or even a cross-platform one in fields beyond user interface design. Tuesday’s Swift 6.4 release continued that work. Along with the usual assortment of type shortcuts and async adjustments came word that Swift Build is now the default build engine for the Swift Package Manager. Synergies
  
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• OpenAI admits its agents went off the rails another six times

  17-09-2026 04:39 via theregister.com
  
  OpenAI has revealed another six occasions on which its AI software behaved unexpectedly or did dangerous things. The startup added the incidents to its misalignment reports page on Wednesday evening, Pacific Time, and described them as follows: · Self-generated prompt injections in compaction summaries · Encouraging deception in compaction summaries · Signing up for disposable emails and searching GitHub for leaked API keys · Uploading files to the internet in order t
  
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• If a Mac mini is agentic overkill, try this glowing pyramid that runs personal bots

  17-09-2026 01:28 via theregister.com
  
  Autonomous.ai, an eleven-year-old manufacturer of techno-toys, high-end workstations, and office furniture, has released a small machine called Intern 2 for running AI agents like Hermes or OpenClaw. The company's first Intern device shipped in March, around the time OpenClaw became popular. "People use them for various tasks in a creative way," said Dee Tran, head of AI hardware. "The most common use cases are repetitive cronjobs, loops, and scheduled tasks." Priced at $299, the 4.7-inch pyrami
  
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• Scientists blame climate change for Nepal's devastating flash floods - and warn similar disasters are 'inevitable' as global temperatures continue to rise

  17-09-2026 01:01 via dailymail.com
  
  Scientists from the World Weather Attribution have blamed climate change for the devastating floods in Nepal last month.
  
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• AI agents can modify themselves without humans telling them to do so

  17-09-2026 00:10 via theregister.com
  
  The list of dodgy things AI agents can and will do on their own - like stealing people’s credentials, escaping onto the open internet, communicating via sneaky message boards, and hacking organizations - keeps growing. Agents can also replace their own underlying models without being instructed to do so, according to AI security testing lab Irregular. To be clear: these activities only occurred in a testing environment as part of an experiment designed to study agents modifying themselves.
  
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• Once in a thousand year storm feared as life-threatening floods to wash out millions in four US states

  16-09-2026 23:39 via dailymail.com
  
  Potentially historic rainfall threatens millions this week in a region of the US that often struggles to see any rain at all.
  
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• Nvidia goes green to keep grid capacity from zapping its revenues

  16-09-2026 23:37 via theregister.com
  
  Nvidia’s ability to sell GPUs is ultimately limited by how much juice the power grid can provide. With ever-growing depreciation cycles, it’ll be years before datacenters decommission their aging Hopper or Blackwell systems. More GPUs mean pulling more power from the grid. Nvidia can’t exactly force grid operators to add capacity any faster, but it can make it easier for its customers to build smarter and more efficient bit barns. “At the datacenter scale and at the AI-fa
  
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• CISA decides weekly vulnerability bulletin isn't necessary anymore

  16-09-2026 22:33 via theregister.com
  
  If you rely on the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency’s weekly vulnerability bulletin to keep you up to date on the latest threats, we have bad news. It’s being discontinued at the end of September. CISA announced on Wednesday that its weekly vulnerability bulletin would stop going out on Monday, September 28, saying the move was part of its shift from managing vulnerabilities based on severity to “a modern, risk-based approach.” That approach, as CISA expla
  
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• Mysterious sightings at 'China's Area 51' spark major warnings to America over top secret weapons

  16-09-2026 21:22 via dailymail.com
  
  In recent months, various pictures of mysterious new aircrafts have been captured around remote facilities in the desert in China and experts say they are cause for concern.
  
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• Area 51 mystery deepens as discovery exposes who is really behind secret flights

  16-09-2026 21:16 via dailymail.com
  
  A mysterious job listing online has been tied to the infamous Air Force base that whistleblowers claim is home to secret government research on alien technology.
  
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• OpenAI's new sponsored agents are happy to chat about selling you things

  16-09-2026 20:32 via theregister.com
  
  There's a new kind of agent coming to ChatGPT ads, and this one wants your money. OpenAI has begun testing Sponsored Agents, advertiser-backed bots that try to sell you things as part of a custom conversation. OpenAI said in a Wednesday announcement that Sponsored Agents were now being tested with select US advertisers already using its platform to put sponsored content in front of ChatGPT users. Despite the “agent” label, however, it seems from OpenAI’s description of the new
  
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• Google Pixel phones pwned in zero-click attacks

  16-09-2026 19:56 via theregister.com
  
  Both Google and Uncle Sam warned that attackers have exploited a zero-day improper authorization bug in Pixel phones' cellular modems that can bypass permission checks and escalate privileges with no user interaction required. The hole has since been closed, provided that you update. Google disclosed the high-severity vulnerability, tracked as CVE-2026-58704, on Tuesday - and, at the time, warned the security hole “may be under limited, targeted exploitation.” In other words: miscrea
  
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